Fresh off the new “The Void" MEGA update to their wonderful creation platformer Levelhead ($6.99) last month, the good folks at Butterscotch Shenanigans have also been trickling out some much-needed update love to their past library of games on iOS and Android. Yes, that’s right. Before beating the snot out of cancer and releasing our 2016 Game of the Year Crashlands ($6.99), the Bscotch Bros were entertaining us with a number of quirky iOS games that all contained that signature Butterscotch Shenanigans style. And by that I mean totally absurd humor and super fun mechanics!
Bscotch has a very heavy game-jamming background, and in fact you can check out all of their wacky game jam creations on PC by visiting their Itch.io page. One of those wacky creations was Towelfight of the Gods, the very first game Butterscotch Shenanigans ever made. For their debut on iOS they polished up and fleshed out that game jam project and released it as the sequel Towelfight 2: The Monocle of Destiny (Free) back in the spring of 2013. The easiest way to describe Towelfight 2 is if the original The Legend of Zelda was a twin-stick shooter where you could also unlock a huge assortment of animals that you’d then blast at enemies out of your magical monocle. Yes, this is very much a Butterscotch Shenanigans game, and we loved it a bunch in our review. Here’s a trailer.
Mere months after Towelfight 2’s launch on iOS, Bscotch was back at it again with their second iOS release called Quadropus Rampage (Free). What the heck is a quadropus? Why, it’s an octopus that only has four legs, silly. You play as said quadropus in this game, and as is also hinted at in the title, you are on a rampage. Quadropus Rampage plays like a typical melee-focused hack ‘n slash action game, with the real fun being found in all the incredibly weird weapons and loot you’ll come across. It’s an endless, randomly-generated game but with a persistent character upgrade system, a super cool achievement system, and lots of unlockable pets and skins. We really enjoyed Quadropus Rampage in our original review from 2013.
In the time between Quadropus Rampage in 2013 and Crashlands launching in 2016, Bscotch took a step back and tried their hand at a simultaneous release of two smaller-scale, more arcade-y style games compared to what they’d previously done. More game jammy, if you will. Those games were Roid Rampage and Flop Rocket, both released on the same day back in February of 2015. Roid Rampage (Free) is about steering an out-of-control spaceship through an asteroid field while trying to pick up as many glowy orb things as possible. The more glowy orb things you pick up, the higher your score. It reminds me a bit of one of my all-time favorites, PAKO – Car Chase Simulator, but in space and with a less slippery physics system. There are a handful of playable ships and pilots which each come with some minor gameplay augmentations, but by and large this is a straighforward high-score chaser through and through, and a darn fun one at that.
And finally we get to Flop Rocket (Free). Oh, Flop Rocket, what might you have been had the stars aligned in a slightly different way? This was a game somewhat born out of the whole Flappy phenomenon, and has you trying to direct a rocket through a hazard-filled cave while also avoiding weird enemies and making use of fuel refill pads that get further and further apart the longer you go. The beauty of Flop Rocket is that there’s an end to the game. Yes, an end! Make it 5km out of the cave and into open space and you win! You’ll unlock an endless mode so don’t worry if that’s more your thing, but we found it incredibly refreshing in our review of Flop Rocket to see a game like this with an actual ending. The great tragedy of Flop Rocket is that it went sort of viral after it came out, but because the free to play monetization system was tuned to be TOO friendly to the players, Butterscotch Shenanigans never became the gazillionaires they so deserve to be. Still, they made another rad game, so that’s something.
Ah, it’s been fun traveling down the Butterscotch Shenanigans memory lane. I loved all 4 of these games when each of them first released, and it’s been great fun revisiting their newly-updated versions all these years later. The updates include support for higher resolution and wider screens that are found on today’s newfangled iOS devices, and the entire back ends for all games have been updated to the Rumpus system introduced with Levelhead. According to Bscotch this makes the games play smoother “Because of the infused Buttery Magic." Makes sense to me. Actually, I lied a little bit. As of this writing Flop Rocket on iOS has not been infused with Buttery Magic just yet, but it’s in the pipeline, I can assure you. Otherwise all 4 of these buttery classics are updated and ready to go on both iOS and Android, and all of these games are totally free to download and play to your heart’s content, with very minor IAP stuff available just for funsies. If you only know Butterscotch Shenanigans from Levelhead or Crashlands, now is a good time to go back and experience how they got to where they are today.
